SLOBO, MIRA AND THEIR WILD BROOD

Every uprising knows its demons on a first-name basis. The French railed at Louis and Marie Antoinette; the Russians at Nicholas and Alexandra; the Filipinos at Ferdinand and Imelda; the Romanians at Nicolae and Elena. Now, in Serbia, the targets are Slobo and Mira, the nicknames of President Slobodan Milosevic and his wife Mirjana Markovic. So renowned is the President’s wife–never call her the First Lady to her face–that she is being pilloried in her own right by the protesters in Belgrade.

Dr. Mirjana Markovic (Ph.D. in sociology) is easy to mock in effigy. Dowdy but vain, she dyes her hair jet black and often tucks a single plastic flower in it. No one is allowed to imitate the style in her presence. Indeed, no one is allowed to see her brush her hair, not even the President. He once walked in while she was grooming, and she began to weep. She also wept as a teenager whenever she did not get the highest marks in class. She was obsessed with Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus, who mourned for a slain brother. She rarely smiles.

Markovic, however, is very powerful. She is the leader of the Yugoslav United Left, an alliance of some 20 communist groups aligned with her husband’s socialist party. Her column in Duga, a Belgrade bimonthly magazine, is closely watched for the latest clues to her husband’s policies. Her cryptic comments, intermingled with poetic observations on weather, have led Serbs to call her column “the Horoscope.” In addition, Markovic believes herself to be clairvoyant and claims to have foreseen the disintegration of Yugoslavia while seated on a beach near Dubrovnik with her husband.

Slobo and Mira have two children: Marija, 31, and Marko, 23. Markovic once doted on Marija, whom she named for a Yugoslav war heroine, Marija Bursac. But, she told her official biographer, “I realized at one point that my Marija will never be Marija Bursac.” Marija went on to study in the school of tourism. Today she runs a radio station owned by her mother’s communist organization and dates a taxi driver turned gangster.

Markovic’s favorite is now Marko, a race-car driver whom she calls “my wild young mustang.” He owns a nightclub called Madona and by his own description loves loud music, women, cars and guns. His racing and gun-toting swagger seem in odd juxtaposition–or maybe not–to having missed out on military service when recruiters declared him mentally unstable. He is proud of his talent for crashing cars, however–30, at last count. “Daddy used to get angry until my 15th,” Marko told the newsweekly Vreme. “And then he sort of gave up.”

The antics of the presidential family are all too visible for Belgrade’s protesters. What angers them most, however, is Milosevic’s invisible transactions. Mladjan Dinkic, an assistant professor of economics at Belgrade University, believes that Milosevic, a former banker, has spirited huge amounts of money out of the country and into banks in Greece, Israel and Cyprus, where Milosevic’s friend Borka Vucic runs an offshore private bank. The money, argues Dinkic, was extracted from ordinary Serbs during rampant hyperinflation and siphoned to foreign bank accounts from a network of black-market currency vendors and quasi-government banks. Even if that is not true, it seems the Milosevic family values are costly indeed.

–By Howard Chua-Eoan. Reported by Dejan Anastasijebic/Belgrade